


The Waiting Game

by Plinkoid_Fics (daveaj)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2015-03-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 07:43:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3282440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daveaj/pseuds/Plinkoid_Fics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one picks you up from your crater this time.</p><p>You're on your own and playing the waiting game isn't anything like you would have pictured it to be.<br/>You have no time left to waste, yet you still do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Waiting Game

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a repost with permission. It was originally by former Tumblr/AO3 user Plinkoid. For more information on the author, go [here](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Daveaj/profile). The rating and tags may not be entirely accurate to what they were before, but I tried to account for any triggers I could find. If anyone leaves comments I will make sure the author sees them. Any notes after this point are the author's original notes.

Arriving to Earth via meteor isn't all that bad in retrospect.  It isn't all that bad as long as someone finds you.  Even if it is by someone who strives on embarrassing your skills of evasion on a daily basis.  Well, maybe especially by someone like that, because from what John had said, Bro had arrived via meteor as well.  That’s the easy part.  When the both of you don’t exist legally, everything becomes much easier.  


Arriving to Earth on a meteor should be pretty fucking cool.  Like some jacked up superman story.  As long as some other meteor surviving tool crawls up to your crater and picks you off that goddamned dead pony.  So the first time around, it was all cool. 

What is pretty bad however is when everything you’d done from that point on suddenly unwinds and counts for absolutely zero and you arrive on Earth, again, on a stupid meteor…  And no one shows up.  You’re just this pathetic baby wailing your pretty little eyes out, and your brother just won’t show up.

That’s not as terrific.  You can’t live some awesomely incognito life in which you and your guardian just don’t fucking exist in the Law’s eyes.  Or blind eyes, whatever.   You’re suddenly very legally real, that’s how it is for me.  Got this stupid legal name pinned to me too, I’ll make my throat bleed trying to get across that I am in fact named _Dave Strider_ , doesn't change the legal papers.  No one showed up.  And then I became this real person and it was suddenly very urgent for someone to come pick me up.  My brother didn't come then either.  I don’t think my mind had developed enough by then for me to make sense of it, but I do remember, yes I remember stupid shit like baby memories because it just so seems the universe doesn't want for me to forget anything, but I’d kept asking myself, in some sort of codification of mental images…  _Where’s Bro?_

See, the thing is, when you are a fucking baby off a fucking fuming meteor, and not an amazing Jupiter sized one, but just this silly, pointless meteor that comes with some ugly white pony…  Well no one is going to stand up to adopt you.  For the legal identification I had gained, I gained no bonds of family.  My brother just wasn't about to show up, and I think that took a few years to sink in.

I was six years old when it dawned to me that it would be considerably different growing up in the ‘50s rather than in the new millennia.  I was six years old and I had already gone through three foster homes.  I was six years old and every tune caught underneath my breath did not yet exist.  I was six years old and I felt the violent need to mix beats, but couldn't.  I was six years old and I asked my foster parents if I could get a pair of anime shades.  They had raised their eyebrows at the word ‘anime’.  I’d gotten a pair of sunglasses that pointed only slightly at the corners, they were for women.  I was six years old and by the next week my foster parents were filling in paperwork and I was shipped to a fourth family.

I was six years old and pesterchum did not exist, and I worried myself sick over my friends.  Friends the people around me could never imagine existed. 

 

 

 

Eventually, it became a game.  Some sick and hurtful game.  How long before this lovely couple wants me out?  Alright, I can’t really peg it as that.  It was whenever I’d catch the bored expression on one of their faces, when I just knew they were about to kick me out in the first place.  Then I offered the last straw, if only for the excuse to claim that it had been my doing.  That I had pushed them to push me out.

It’s really hard to disguise the truth however, and no matter which way I want to twist it, it’s a safe bet that I already had tons of traits viable of getting my kicked out.

There are the sunglasses of course.  It seems stupid now, caring about the color of my irises and…  I guess, stuff like that.  That too as like a game back then too…  Or in the future of a different universe?  But not a cruel game, a heartwarming one almost.  ‘ _Let’s keep these crazy cool eyes a secret!’_ With my brother, it was just something fun that we had in common, odd eye colors, something we could cherish, maybe?  Maybe I was hiding, but in this life I _was_ hiding.  I was hiding the fright that shook me perpetually, because that shit just isn't cool, not on any level of irony.

There’s that funny thing about traumatic events or periods of your life, they’re not everlasting.  They’re just these small bouts, small memories that end up defining your entire attitude.  And so, in game, I’d spent months’ worth of time.  Statistically speaking, not most of my life, not at all.  Yet, now, every corner I turn is the breath holding fear of stumbling onto my own corpse.  It’s Post-Scratch, the game will start up again, and I just don’t know when it will strike and just how I will be involved.  It’s Post-Scratch, and at this point, absolutely everything scares me.  So I keep it nicely tuckered away, the paranoia filled glances, the nervous twitching, the wide eyed stares of horror, all behind those old fashioned sunglasses.

And there’s just absolutely everything related to that fucking fear.  On some levels, I feel as if Bro had conditioned me to this lifestyle.  Always keep on the lookout, always be at the ready.  So I couldn't find any shitty Japanese swords, knives in the households I ended up in always went missing.  And when they were found taped in various odd places, like the back of the toilet’s tank, it was easy work to kick me out.

My name is Dave Strider, though my birth certificate says otherwise, then again that piece of paper is sitting on a throne of lies—  My name is Dave Strider, I’m thirteen years old and I've stopped counting foster homes.  I’m thirteen years old and I realize that my brother, my caretaker, my only semblance of true family isn't showing up.  Neither are my friends. 

So I’d assumed of course.

 

 

 

The owners of the newest house I've landed into are really supportive, almost forceful.  They really want me to succeed; they want me to grow up as a sane, social, person.  It’s not likely to happen.  I don’t feel like myself at all.  I’m not nearly who I was when I had been thirteen years old the last time.  I’m fearful and never could I be capable of holding the powers to twist time and the levelheadedness to play the field of paradox space.  So I can’t grow up to be that, only because I don’t think of this as growing up.  I think of it as a null life, just as the session had been fruitless, as is this life.

They’re just lovely people.  Sadly, they’re just not my brother and they’re just too late.  No one had picked me up from my crater and that was that.  They’re lovely people, and when a new family moves into the neighborhood, shortly after I’d arrived, they had been the first ones to rush at their doorstep with a cherry pie.  They’d come back and Mary had had bits of the pie in her hair and it was just really weird, but they looked really pleased with themselves and somehow simultaneously happy.  Genuine happy.

They had initially invited me to go with them and I’d locked myself in the bathroom in response.  It hasn't been long since I've arrived.  I think they already doubt their resolve of welcoming me into their home.  On the first they had snatched my glasses away.  And though my heart had fell at the prospect of them seeing me for a lonesome and scared child, even though I was well the double of my given age, they had only cowered back at the sight of my eyes.  They made my visits to the town’s church much more frequent than any of my previous guardians had suggested in the past.  Never again did they confiscate my glasses.

 

 

 

After their initial welcome visit however, they had been very insistent for me to go over.  Telling me there was a boy my age, telling me I could make friends with him.  Few months later, turned out that was a lie.  They had roped me into going to this kid’s birthday party, who I had never met, only, it’s not like it was his thirteenth birthday, it was more like his nineteenth birthday.  And with my old-fashioned ethics (though I really can’t call them that, can I?) it had already struck me as very odd that he wasn't already off and married with some lovely lady.

And it could have been really, really, really awkward.  Instead it was excruciating.

Obviously, from the moment he had opened the door, I could tell he had been hassled into inviting me over to make me feel accepted, and he did so with enormous chivalry, and did not act embarrassed at all amidst the crowd of older teenagers, almost adults. I never really got his acceptance speech though.  I got the line ‘ _Welcome to the Crocker residence!’_

Got jack shit after that.

Because apparently I’d caught sight of Senior Crocker, watching over the scene with unlimited pride.  He had a snazzy suit and, I guess, for this day and age that’s not so uncommon.  But no ties, only an oversized bow tie, it really gave off this vibe of…  Jokester?  His hair was streaking with white, though his moustache remained as the reminder of a time of ebony hair.  A lot older, a lot bigger, a lot taller than me, but still with the same squared frames over his eyes, still the same overbite, still the same John.

After that, it was pretty much a staring buffet, mentally willing him to burst into the room and to confess that his name was not truly Crocker, but Egbert.  He never did, and he never looked my way.  Most likely, he had no idea I was looking his way to begin with, my sunglasses as an eternal shield.  Shield that I needed, because this time I was pretty fucking terrified.

He looked well.  He looked like he had been picked up from his crater.  He looked like he’d led some sort of life and whatever had been before the scratch, he hadn’t been part of it, not really.  And just where as I felt I could not grow up for I was not everything I could be, he wasn’t everything he could be either.  And it was upsetting, and it was shocking, and it was too soon too quick.

It was too soon for me to come out of hiding.

 

 

 

I spent most of the night bored out of my mind, as it was the other option from completely losing all of my shit.  The party was too mature for me.  The party had too much socializing for me.  The party was definitely too much and also too soon.

So I hadn't been sneaking around John’s house.  It wasn't even really John to begin with.  I had been looking for an escape, some space.  Stumbled up a few staircases, stumbled into hallways and wound up in a bedroom.  And if anything had ever scared me, this had terrified me.  It was a little girl’s room, that much had been clear.  It was absolutely untouched though.  Not in the way that a layer of dust had settled over, no, it was obviously very well kept, but in the sense that there was a near flawlessness to every object and a perplexing orderliness to the disposition of the furniture.

Bubblegum, cotton candy, lavender, the colors were all a bit too much.  But I went in anyway.  Because it called to me, because I couldn't trace my steps back.  And because the eerie silence was familiar to me.  It was similar to those silences when I could hear the ring of Rose’s voice, how she had sounded on Derse, how she was and will always be the voice of reason.  I half expected to hear one of her lines echo through my skull again.  It never came.  

Instead, the first object I had touched turned out to be a music box, and for how limited I found the repertory of music to be growing up in the states in the ‘50s…  The notes panged at my very being, nagging me to remember where the melody was from.  I couldn't, I couldn't recognize it. 

It wasn't Rose who spoke, it was John, as he flickered the lights on.  Behind my sunglasses, it made no difference, but still, I shut the music box with a loud _thud_ and I could have sworn the lights and commotion had chased a ghost away.

“I’d really thought I was getting a daughter,” his laugh is almost a guffaw before it settles into slight helplessness, “I don’t really know why.”

I kept staring at him, as I had done before trying to push the entire scene completely away from me.  The bad thing was that all I could really see now was John.  And no matter how I put it, I’d found that one friend I’d lost amongst the others.

“Maybe I’ll have a granddaughter,” his fingers ghost over the nearest bookshelf and his smile turns to tender, seemingly happy, even though I was only standing there creepily.

Most of the time, I feel like I get sent back from houses for my general creepiness.  Hidings kitchen knives around the house, hiding red eyes, etcetera…  But this, me standing stock-still in an unused and creepily over colored bedroom did not dissuade him from speaking to me at all.

“Egbert,” I drop the word heavily, almost wanting to rip my shades off for dramatic impact, I don’t, and there is no light of recognition.

“Oh yes, I was told you like coming up with original names for yourself!  So should I call you Egbert?”

My tongue slides over my teeth as I mull this one over.  Egbert, John, treating me like a child, because, logically, this was what the predicament called for.  I can’t lie and say it didn't feel good, even though some of my worst fears were breathing into the scenery.  Yes, some of my comrades were in this world, yes, I was the only one who remembered.

“Strider.  Dave Strider, that’s my name I mean, my real one,” I put an end to my words as I waited for recognition to fall upon him, though I also had to fight down the need to go on and to say more.

He doesn't recognize me. 

“Tell me about your life,” I breathe out quickly, almost wanting to sit down on the big frilly bed, but thinking better of it as the emotional value of the room weighed down on me.

I don’t know why I asked.  I know why I wanted to know.  When would I be kicked out of my new house?  When would I see John again?  Never presumably.  What had he lived through without me?  How had he gotten on his feet?  It’s been thirteen years.

It’s been thirteen fucking years and I have been dying to hear from someone I knew, anyone.  For him, it’s been longer, almost fifty years.  He hasn’t been dying to hear from me, but that’s alright too.

“Wouldn’t you rather go back downstairs?  Surely you wouldn’t want to waste time on an old man like me,” and though the fatherly smile remains plastered on, it’s easy to see that he is slightly bitter, slightly sad, silently acceptant that he was getting old and that I am, indeed very young.

But there’s also this underlying, this sudden certainty that he might not have been waiting to hear from me, but here and now, he did want to hear from me.  He liked me already.  Perhaps we were meant to be best friends no matter what.

“You could never waste my time,” and it sounds out a lot more dramatic than intended.

For some fucking reason, I decide to add on to that anyway, “My time’s been up for a while now.”

It’s not the same, and every sentence he hands me is laden with double meaning, but only for me.  It’s not the same, I’m some small child and he’s lived his life, but I laugh just as much as I would have, and he does too, and it’s comfortable enough, comfortable for such an odd situation.  And by the end of the night, I don’t know the name of his kid.  But he walks me back to my house, and when he pushes me inside and smiles at me, with some weird affectionate best friends from another life smile, my foster parents might be a bit suspicious.

 

 

 

After that everything became just a little better, or even a lot better.  And maybe it didn't suck so much to be put into the legal system if I could meet him just this once.  I go over to the ‘ _Crocker_ ’ residence way too often, and we do stupid shit together.  Stupid shit that doesn't really qualify as best friend shit, but that really feels as if he is my grandfather.  There are just those moments, when his blue eyes sparkle too much, or when he plays a prank on me, that I am reminded just how much I love him and just how much I have missed him.

I thought the people I lived with would find it creepy or something, like every other stunt I pull…  But they seemed way acceptant of _me_ accepting someone else into my life as parental figure.  And probably, obviously, they used this to their advantage.  They spoke with him, lengthily, and I could feel it when he tried to urge me towards moral shit, stuff, whatever…  I don’t know.  It felt a bit constricting to tell the truth.  The more trouble I gave them, the more he intervened and tried to fix it.

I used to lock myself into my bedroom.  Not only here, everywhere.  Even here, without any lock, I’d block the door.  There’s just something about falling asleep in bed and never having the color purple come into a dream.  There’s just something about the possibility of staying in a bed and not having to dive back into time shenanigans.  There’s just something that calls forth Rose’s voice.

“We’re safe.”

This is all I ever hear.  And it’s a lot less scary than everything I see around me.  It’s true.  We’d done it.  We’d gone far into the game, without the John and Jade team, we’d gone back, we’d slept in Derse’s tower and shit…  Shit we were in the Alpha session and we were safe as hell.  I had a hard time getting up from bed.  I wanted to stay in eternally.  Most foster parents claimed depression to authorities, it isn't at all how I see it.  I’m not depressed, I’m fucking content to go to bed.  It’s good, because I remember that nothing should be scary in this universe, but…  As soon as I leave that bed, everything turns to scary colors.

It was a matter of time before they got him to intervene into that.

It took less time for them to remove the bedroom door altogether.

Could have used a bit more of a warning.  I don’t know, I had been washing the dishes?  Probably.  And he’d snuck up on me, because he is a trickster no matter how old he gets, apparently.  But when his hand fell on my shoulder, it all turned to shit.  Less than a second to get the knife out from the underside of the kitchen shelf.  Another second and I had it firmly pointed towards his heart.

It was just John though.  Big, old, different John, but John.

“Wah!” He let out in a strained wonder.

And I had to calm down my breathing as I did my best to push my sunglasses back up, dutifully hoping they hadn't slipped too low.

“What is it Egbert?” And by now, he has stopped questioning me about the nickname, even when said with so much shakiness.

The conversation stalls, he talks about stupid shit, I know he is about to educate me in place of my foster parents or have a heart-to-heart.  No clue which one is scarier.

“So why is it that you lock yourself inside your bedroom?”

“Used to,” I let out almost bitterly, turning back to the dishes and hoping he catches any other word I was about to offer, “Because it’s safe.”

“And you’re not safe right now?” But his tone isn’t so confident now that I had pat away the knife I had just threatened him with for having snuck up on me.

“I sure am, hard to remember though,” I squeeze through almost gritted teeth, thinking of everything that could go wrong at any given moment.

“How is it safer in bed?” And perhaps he looks just a bit too interested, as if he too could come to be scared from time to time.

It’s hard to swallow down.

“Well you know how I’d been looking for you?”

He nods once, expression serious, I don’t know if he believed any of my stories about past lives and resurrected players, but he sure listened intently and retained the information, and that was just good enough for me.

“There are other people too.”

“ _Oh_.”

I don’t know what to make of the sound, so I ignore it completely.

“I get this feeling she might remember me…  I bet she’s scared too.  But when I’m alone, I feel like we’ve made it, we’ve found our safe place,” I can’t help the tinges of sadness added to my words.  She must be lonely too if she remembers.  It would be my fault.  It would be the first time travel I had taken her on that had unlocked her abilities to remember.

I don’t know, maybe not, but it was a legitimate fear.  Another one to add to the list.

“Any way to track her down?”

“Not with this lack of technology.”

Silence.  He doesn't really understand what that means, he tries, I’m sure, but it would be pretty amazing for him to imagine a world sixty years in the future.

“Well,” he starts out fondly, and now I turn away from the dishes once and for all, ready to listen, “What if you made it to stardom?  Become insanely popular and she will hear of you from newspapers and such!”

A stutter almost creeps its way into my throat, “Well yeah, maybe.  That sounds like a long-term project though…”

“I’m betting, she’s thought of the same thing, and is already on her way to the glamorous life!”

Not much is exchanged afterwards, I become extremely pensive.

 

 

 

It’s a few weeks later that I find the paperwork in the study room.  The paperwork setting me free from this household and into the hostility of another one.  Game over.  A-fucking-gain.

I waste no time to run out of the house, I practically trip over myself, on several instances.  It’s raining outside, I tear the sunglasses off my face, in fear of falling to the asphalt altogether with the lack of good vision.  He must have seen me rushing towards his house from his bedroom window, he meets me on his porch.

“I’m getting new foster parents,” and the tone sounds desperate even to my own ears.

He is quick to look crestfallen, not quick enough to conceal it.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he’s heartbroken for me, not for my imminent exit from his life.

“I waited thirteen fucking years for you,” I want to shout, but it barely makes it out of my throat.

“You've told me—“

“You don’t understand!” It finally builds into a shout, “I’m still fucking waiting for you!  I’m waiting for John Egbert to show up.  For the boy who can do the windy thing!”

He genuinely looks distressed, almost hurt with the recoil of the words. 

I run away, and he shouts after me, he shouts out “Dave!” even though he’d always called me by my legal name.  I go for the opposite direction than my foster homes and use all the restraint possible to not run back for him.

 

 

 

The day I leave, I sit out in the lawn for hours.  They wouldn't come pick me up until three in the afternoon, it was eleven in the morning when he came to sit down with me.

“Our lives are null,” I whispered as a greeting.

And his hand found my head and I lowered it, because, shit, shit, shit…

“We still have a role to play.”

“Nope, not me.  As soon as the heir is dead, I’m out of the game.”

I know he won’t understand, at this point it doesn't matter.  It’s honestly surprising to have to leave his side.  Too soon and too quick.

“The heir is alive and so is the knight,” he whispers back, smile still fatherly and fond.

I give myself whiplash just turning to him, and, though I thought I would feel disappointment to finding out he wasn't talking about the two of us, I felt reassured.  Because he knew our betas were out there, possibly on their way.  He was referring to them, not to us.

“What about us?”

“Isn't there someone you have to prepare for?  Someone you need to welcome into the session.”

I remember the music box in his house and the distorted melody. 

My brother hadn't arrived yet, but… 

“I’ll wait for as long as it takes.”

“Yeah, I know.”

And on that last day in that particular neighborhood, I stupidly realize that he had known most of that all along.  He hadn't known me, or the things we had gone through, but he knew about the alpha session, he knew what he had to do.  He had known, but he was simply…  He had simply waited longer.  He had waited longer and he knew how to play the game.  I didn't.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what this is aaaaaah--


End file.
